Technorati Making Changes – Adds Topics

Technorati has just added a new feature called topics, I was very excited to hear this because as you know i’ve written a couple of articles begging Technorati to get back to it’s roots of building tools for bloggers (see Can Bloggers Save Technorati). Unfortunately my excitement was short lived, and I’m beginning to feel like a long suffering technorati user.

It turns out that topics are just a live feed of blog posts that are under 6 unfeasibly large categories of Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life. Needless to say these topics are updated every second or so, leading to a pretty useless stream of unrelated blog posts, from popular blogs. Read/Write Web where I picked up this story agrees:

Unfortunately, Technorati’s scroll of news moves so fast it defies usefulness. In the space of a couple of minutes 30 or so stories might fly by — hovering your mouse over a story stops the scroll, but that doesn’t do much to alleviate the information overload. Further, once a post drops off the scroll (which doesn’t take long) it appears to be gone for good.

Now Read/Write Web suggested in their headline that Technorati might be taking on Techmeme and I really wish that was the case, but it’s not, Techmeme actually pulls together blog posts that are talking about the same thing, which is really valuable if you want to understand the context of a story. IMHO if Technorati did try and take on Techmeme that would be a very good move, Techmeme is extremely limited in the topics that it covers and the blogs that it indexes. It seems to me that Technorati with it’s link tracking, tags, and authority could blog Techmeme out of the water on more niche topics. Imagine a techmeme for marketing, or social media, or secondlife, or twitter.

I’m afraid the Technorati topics reminds me of that phrase “for every complex problem there is a simple solution which is wrong”.